The Big Music (5 page)

So Helen and her mother found home here in the end. And …

Perhaps.

Perhaps, nothing. It’s only yes. Is what her mother means. Of course her mother can’t keep that from her daughter. Her daughter’s seen the look.

The glow coming off the pair of them like a kind of heat when they’re in a room together, not often in a room together, sure, but when it occurs – that he may be sitting there in his chair and she’s banking the fire or she’s brought him something on a tray – then the feeling holds and burns. Though neither of them will talk about it, or show it – of that feeling or that light, to others or each other or themselves – no, not for years. Not for long, long years …

Still.

A daughter can see.

A faithful daughter.

‘And Margaret’ she would say. ‘Don’t think that I don’t realise how that might keep a mother. Might keep a daughter, too.’

(notes)

I know he’s not been swallowing the tablets. The doctor knows. When he visited last he told me. ‘John wants to come to the end now, Margaret’ is
what old Ramsay said. And I can’t force him. I can’t make him take the medication if he doesn’t wish it for himself.

And for me? I don’t know what to wish for. Him alive the shadow of the man I used to share a bed with, lie down with, while somewhere else in the House, in my own room, my child and my husband were sleeping – am I not to remember those times? Or the way he and I were together at the beginning? The way being with him gave me my strength, the feeling, I mean, for being on my own, truly alone. So strong in my body after that time we were together that it meant I could take Iain as a husband when he came here. That kind of strength.

It only comes from a bed.

I wouldn’t say any of this, of course, to the others. Only write it to you, Helen. When you come to read this sometime.

And I think you know in full anyway what it was John gave me. I think you know what it was I needed for you’ll have something of those same needs yourself. That come with having a child and looking after the child. That we seek out ways of making ourselves strong. Keeping the things in our lives that are private deep in and holding secrets as a source of power – though here I am telling my secrets now, in writing them down.

(Though I wouldn’t tell about the room at the top of the House, where we used to be together, I would never tell …)

And so for that, for private thoughts, for my memories of that time, would I let him slip off now into illness and into age?

Or try and get him back by standing with him, watching, to try and make him that way take the pills, watching while he swallows, watching with my eyes his eyes the way we used to watch each other, every movement held.

Of course I would try to keep him.

Even with me seeing the way he is now. And him not wanting to eat or sleep or take his proper medication, going off on his own for hours back there in the summer like he used to do in the past, taking himself off for days at a time and I never knew where he went, but now not doing anything much at all.

Even then I would wish him away? To have him be finished for himself here and all our past together gone then, with the present?

You don’t answer questions until you need to, that’s the problem. You keep holding out, waiting. You keep thinking, a few months it will be better. Or let the summer pass and then you say the winter, let another year go by …

And still we’ve not decided here what we’ll do, when he’s gone. And it won’t be long now, with Sarah phoning up from London every ten
minutes
to see if he’s taken another turn and how to get him away down there with her, to one of her hospitals, I suppose, where they’ll lock him up, where she thinks he’ll be safe.

I know I won’t find another job. I don’t want it. Too old now, anyway, to be working on an estate somewhere else and there’d be others to deal with there and not like here where it’s just ourselves and we can be on our own. For with Iain the way he is and Helen with us now and her baby to look after – it’s not as though we could at any other place be fitting in.

Besides, they’d know. In those other places. That we’d been working for John Sutherland and that not ever a piece of land managed like the others are managed. More a place for the piping always, it’s been, than a proper farm or for the fishing or the deer. And they’d know, for sure, the other estates. That we wouldn’t have worked here in the way that would be expected. And they would have heard about Iain, too. That there’s nothing much for him on the hills, with the run of the few sheep that’s left. That there’s little here for him to do.

So it would all get out.

That we do things differently, not like the other properties in the area, the farms and the estates … And always have done so. And now that the Piping School is long over, and the students and the pipers gone. We’re just on our own here. And we have been for a long time now, a long time.

Therefore …

(and such a lovely word to write, to say:
Therefore
…)

With everything I’ve laid down here on paper, of truth and love and intimacy, the wrap of the past around our lives … I don’t claim it’s as though any of us here would want John to finish it. Though the dark’s closer for him now than it ever was. Still. We need him to be here, we all
do, for our privacy and for things to stay the same, the place the way it is to continue, for all of us.

Therefore …

(John Callum … My John Callum … Always
therefore
…)

Though it may be that we’re caring for a ghost here, is how it feels, and though it’s like standing with your back to vacancy, so we do, we stand. And I confess I have feelings for the man even after all this time, for he took my body and he let me take his, at a time when bodies were all I was wanting. He understood that in a way I believe few men will understand it from a woman. And that I could have at the same time towards him both coolness of distance and great warmth? I would have the same coolness and the same warmth now.

Sits.

Does nothing.

The fire on though it’s not cold.

But it burns. It burns.

For Margaret’s told him all he needs to know. About herself and that other. She’s told him long since so no reason to have it between them – but how it does rise up between them. What happened in the past not gone away, not over the years it hasn’t, and sometimes Iain senses it in the House, a thing still existing between his wife and another man and it sickens him, like a poison you give animals going through his own veins, to think of the old man and his wife having been together in that way.

So don’t think.

Is why he won’t.

Think anything, not now.

Takes up the bottle, and sets it down. Won’t. Not ever. And that’s what he’s done, too. Kept it all from his mind.

Though from the first time he met him here at the House, when
Margaret
came out of the House to greet him, it was like he could smell it,
that something had taken place, was maybe still being enacted between the two of them. So he remembers when that other first returned, for the funeral of old Callum. And the way he was with Margaret then, greeting her. Remember? Well, there’s always that. That they’d known each other before, he could see that, though neither showed it. But remember too, he always will, Iain, he’ll remember … How Margaret greeted him also, greeted Iain, the first day when he came here for the job. That day when he came here to meet old Roderick Callum and his wife – and this long, long before that other’s return. And he was a young man then, by God, Iain was, he was no more than twenty – and how Margaret was with him then, that day, with him, Iain … Remember that? Of course he’ll always remember. For that’s the important thing. How she looked at him, that day as she came out of the house to meet him, smoothing back her dark hair with a hand that she then put out to him. To him! To greet him! He was lonely all right. And it was as though she could recognise that in him, she could see it right away. Couldn’t she? That he was lonelier than that other would ever be, that one who would want for nothing but who would always get more and more and more.

For in the touch of her hand …

Though he came to know later, would sense in that other, the way he was with Margaret, that there was something still going on between them … Even so he remembers, too, Iain does, that first touch of Margaret’s hand taking his hand that day. When she’d been lovely to him, to Iain, right there from the beginning. How he’d noticed everything that day. How she had a speck of a kid with her, standing at her side – and he’d taken that in, Iain had, how the child was Margaret’s child and there was not about her any father – Iain had noticed that, too, from the outset. Had come to understanding right away: that it would be Iain himself who would take on that role with her, with Margaret, to help her with the child. It would be how he would get her. How he’d be able to claim her, keep her for himself, and they’d be secure together then.

Man and wife.

All through the little girl. Through Margaret being a woman on her own without a husband and with a child to bring up – and he could be
the one who would help them. The father. The husband. He would be the one who took care when that other had never been around, the one, Iain could be, who takes care now and always.

For he is the lonely one. Iain is. No one else needed to be with
someone
like he needed. And Margaret was there from the beginning, coming out of the House to greet him …

The touch of her lovely hand …

Just her.

Just Margaret.

And so she was a woman who’d been with other men? So she had a child by one of them, and something there between her and old Callum’s son that had started long before he came along, before Iain came along, and that he could sense when that other was around and could feel? Still she had turned towards him that day, Margaret had, towards him, put out her hand – she’d touched his hand.

He looks down at his same hand now, as though the mark of her press might be there still upon his palm.

See?

And –

Look at me, Margaret. Look at me.

Is how he willed her to see him that day. As he takes another sip, remembering.

Look at me.

For hadn’t he so needed for her to see him? From the moment of their greeting? So needed to make her understand along with him – that he could offer her … Something. That might count just as much as love, as feeling towards him. That by way of income and support for the business of bringing a child up into the world … So he could help. Though the child would never be his child, still …

They could be a family, the three of them together.

Because that was the kind of man he was. Iain was. Who would be straightforward that way, not trying to be the big man if you had no intention. The opposite of that other, then, the type who’d be standing too close to Margaret whenever he came back here – but not here ever to
help in any kind of way that was real. And he’s always done that, too, that other. He’s always stood too close.

No wonder he’s always hated him, then. Old Johnnie. Will always hate him. For how could you not hate the man who loved your woman? Though you tried not to let it matter? Tried to keep it all down? For that other was the one got to her first and he still has to live with that, Iain does – the memory coming in every day as they’re here at this House together now the old boy’s back to stay. Iain having to bear it that he came second in line, second. Even now having to watch his wife with him, to give him his medicine, attend to the making of his bed …

No wonder he hates the one seems to take it all.

Is what he thinks.

If he thinks.

And he won’t think.

For who gives a hare’s jump now about old Johnnie? Those people that he used to know – where are they now? They’re not here. Not even his own wife, his own son. And Iain has that, he has a family around him. And it’s Iain, himself … Who did that. Made them into a family here. So Margaret could be his wife. And Helen like his daughter, she could be his daughter. Because he was a man who always wanted children, and no children followed, so Helen is like his only child and it’s how he thinks of her: ‘My Daughter,’ he says to himself sometimes, when he used to set the money aside for her schooling and her university in Glasgow, he thought it then. ‘My Daughter, Helen,’ he would say. Though the money went into Margaret’s purse so she could be the one would give it, that Helen would think she was taking it from her mother, not him, for he had little part in her life other than that, he was not her father … But still he could say: My Daughter, to himself. Think he might be something to her in that way, of helping her with money for her schooling, that he could be a father to her then and she his daughter, and him helping her that she could get herself off to university and into the world …